Saturday, 19 December 2015

The Many Eklavya's of Guru Chetan Bhagat

For those of you not familiar with
the Mahabharata, the tale of Eklavya and Guru Drona (which is a small sub-plot
in an otherwise massive epic) can be summarised as below:

Guru
Drona is the most revered teacher of battle-craft in the land. At his ashram,
he trains the Princes of Hastinapura (all one hundred and five of them)
alongside his own son, in the various aspects of fighting, though archery is
the primary skill of the time. Guru Drona’s favourite pupil is Prince Arjuna.

One
day, the Princes are off on a hunting expedition when they come across a tribal
lad who is practising archery himself, and appears to be extraordinarily good
at it. On being brought before Drona, he claims that he, too, is a student of
the Guru. Shocked, Drona asks him to explain himself, and the boy, whose name
is Eklavya, explains that since he knows, as a low-caste tribal, he would never
have been able to learn from Drona himself, he observed the Guru with his
pupils, and building himself a clay idol of Drona, practised until he learned
the craft for himself.

Unable
to bear the thought of a mere tribal lad surpassing his favoured pupil, Arjuna,
Drona demands a payment for his services as a Guru. Eklavya readily agrees, and
Drona names his price – Eklavya’s right thumb – the one appendage without which
effective archery is impossible. Eklavya complies, and Arjuna’s supremacy with
the bow-and-arrow is now unchallenged.

Of course, many variations exist of
the story, with varying degrees of blame being apportioned among the
characters, but it is not my intention to delve into that at the moment. Rather,
it is to establish that it is possible for a person to directly influence
another, as a teacher and a student, without having any intention to.

Which brings us to Literature. A
successful author often spawns imitators, a fact that is, no doubt, inevitable.
No doubt there were those who tried to imitate Shakespeare.

We definitely know that this
charlatan wrote a ‘sequel’ to Don Quixote and made good money of publishing it,
before Cervantes responded with his own sequel. There must, no doubt, be a lot
of Victorian-era authors who tried to imitate Dickens, Hardy, Trollope, Austen
and their ilk. That we do not know them today is because their works did not
survive the test of time, and no doubt such will be the fate of most authors
alive today, present company not excepted.

But what of Chetan Bhagat? He is
India’s most popular author, writing in a genre that is best described as Young
Adult Romance. His first few books, partially autobiographical and focussing on
slices of real-life as well as humour, became cult hits among young Indians who
were just awakening to ‘reading in English’, and since then he has written a
bunch more, though each one seems to be more sanctimonious and less fun than
the last.

Personally, I do not grudge him his
success. There are, indeed, some things he does really well, or at least, did
in his earlier works. He wrote characters who were realistic and who a reader
was interested in, plots that were simple and did not depend on exaggerated
twists, and a narrative voice that was humorous and non-judgmental.

Unfortunately, he has spawned a horde
of Eklavya’s – young men (and probably some women too), who believe that Chetan
Bhagat’s success can be reduced to a ‘formula’ that can be replicated. Look
over the ‘Indian fiction’ section at Amazon or a brick-and-mortar bookstore and
it is inundated with romance fiction. Titles range from trite to hackneyed to incomprehensible
(Durjoy Dutta for
instance, uses titles that would leave most of scratching our heads).

For myself, I would normally never
read them. I like a good romance novel well enough, (if you think about it, a
lot of the works of the master of English prose, Sir P G Wodehouse, are
romantic comedies), but being acquainted with the works of the Guru of these
hopeful Eklavyas’, I think I know what to avoid. But one does not always get
what one wants, and a by-product of having a bit of a reputation among one’s
peer group (however well or ill-deserved), for reviewing books well, I do get
stuck with copies of books and asked to review them.

I try to get out of it, for obvious
and very genuine reasons – I usually have a book I am reading, at any given
time, and the next 3 are planned as well. Besides that, one writes a little to
pay for cutting chai (the pittance I am paid barely pays for that, even), and one
writes for no pay at all, a novel that’s going nowhere. But more than anything
else, one has a social life, with a family and friends.

Still, I did end up reading two
such books recently. One was sent to me by the author himself, a school /
college-going teenager who has been aggressively marketing his book in social
media as well as, it would appear, physically.

The other was given to me for
reviewing by a relative of the author, who is about twice the age of the first
author, a Chartered Accountant and a high-ranking working professional.

That both the teen and the working
professional were vicarious students of Chetan Bhagat, is immediately obvious.

The teenager’s book can be summed
up as a so-called tragedy where the protagonist, a college-going girl, falls in
love with an older man she comes across at a traffic signal, bunks classes to
spend time with him as he tutors her in whatever she misses, and then randomly
gets forced into a marriage by her parents.

The husband turns out to be a nice
chap though, and never consummates the marriage; she adopts a daughter and
continues to pine for the lost love, and in the end it turns out that he was
living close by to ‘keep an eye’ on her all along.If that doesn’t make you slap your head on
your computer keyboard, the fact that he is found by the twenty-year-old
daughter in a matter of weeks, when neither the girl not her husband could find
him for years, definitely should.

At no stage of the book is there
any character development, events are random – characters fall in love because
the plot needs them to, parents are evil because they need to be, and ‘forced
arranged marriage’ is a deus ex machina
to make things go wrong, again, because the plot needs it to. As a reader, I
did not care what happened to any of the people in it, dialogue was stilted and
elements of Hindi movies were so liberally sprinkled about that I could sense a
Nadeem Shravan soundtrack playing in the background.

The CA’s book was better in terms
of narration. I could even excuse the flaws in narration and language, as being
a result of using a ‘suburban Mumbai dialect’. Not that there is any style, but
at least it’s not blatantly bad writing. It’s the plot holes, though, that
would make a Bollywood sex comedy seem intelligent.

The hero, also a CA, gets a job in
Chennai (cue a chapter of ‘cultural displacement jokes’), meets a strikingly
beautiful Punjabi girl in an elevator, uses manipulation and artifice to get to
know her better, helps her when she has a completely-random, plot-convenient
health issue that is never referred to again, and then wins her over by
proposing to her on the night she breaks up with her boyfriend. Attempts at
Bhagat – 2 States – esque humour follow, until, again, the ‘arranged marriage’
bogey is raised, followed by a lost phone, confusion caused by Mumbai having
two terminals, and then a happy ending that involves plastic surgery and a song
written by the protagonist, that was never referred to until twenty pages from
the end.

I’m sure there are worse books out
there. In fact, I know there are, Amazon’s sample chapters are often enough to
establish that. But stuff like this, I often think, would never have seen light
of day if not for an unfortunate sense of ‘anyone can write’ brought about by
Bhagat. In seeing only the simplicity of his language and his use of young
Indian protagonists, writers like these two are missing the wood for the trees.

Not every writer who writes about
elves and dwarves and an impending apocalypse is a JRR Tolkein. Not every
writer who writes about serial killers and evil clowns is Stephen King. And
certainly, the word ‘Magic’, repeated twice in a title, would not make the
story ‘magical realism’ as Rushdie and Marquez would have it.

If aspirational, barely-literate
Indians need an idol to worship, Chetan Bhagat is as good as any. But if you
have aspirations to write, please, for Chetan Bhagat’s sake, if not your own,
find your own voice. Write what you want to. And wait until you’re ready to
publish it. Even your Guru wrote a few decent books before inflicting absolute
crap on the market. Books that had something
to redeem them in the eyes of the reader, something that had not been done
before.

But if you are going to write the
same stories, with the same twists and the same language (in varying degrees of
horrible-ness), you might as well pull off an Eklavya. That poor kid got away
with cutting off his thumb. To prevent yourself from writing, you’d have to cut
off all your fingers.

12 comments:

The post is quite long(fine, as the subject demands it). Agree, to what you explained or mentioned here. Idolizing and imitating shouldn't go hand in hand, even Eklavya developed his own style(even after he cut off his thumb), you may worship someone but can't be him, as you are you. Who don't understand this fact fails.

Ha ha ha. I can feel your anguish Percy. I've stopped reading romance, especially by Indian authors and politely refuse to review the books offered. (I excuse myself by saying, 'I like to read books I like to pay for. Thanks for the offer.' Very well written though and very valid points. :)

Very apt, Percy. Imitation they say is the best form of flattery, and there have been some imitations that were better than the original. No harm in idolizing someone who has become a phenomenal success, but these lil chetans should realize that their stories and narration should have the strength and wherewithal to engage the attention of discerning readers.

Lets look at this from a dispassionate supply-demand standpoint. Chetan Bhagat spawned demand for a particular genre of fiction. His first 2-3 books were exemplary, entertaining and literary enough to be pioneering works of this genre. Money was made, a business model established and a large, growing pocket of demand created. However, quality supply became an issue. Many me-too products entered the market and even the pioneer lost sheen. Resulting in the state of this genre today: cluttered, mediocre, community cess pool of writers' delusions of talent and readers left with a yearning for another 5-point-someone.

There are actually publishers out here who will give an author a plot and tell them to write it. The plot is a barebones skeleton, and it is up to the author to go from point to A to B to C and so forth. That is actually happening even with the top authors here, which is why so much similar stuff is popping out. But it would be unfair to blame the authors as long as there is a market for such work. It is the market that is equally at fault.

Another prime reason is that these books are famous among the yuppie generation who are more net-savvy and hence they are instrumental in shouting better. This leads to good books taking a backseat while all we see are cookie-cutter romances with mouthfuls of titles.

Indeed, the responsibility is a collective one, on authors who know no better, on publishers who will take a chance on nothing else, and on readers who flock like lemmings to books that destroy their intellect.

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About Me

Percy Slacker was bitten by Schrodinger’s Cat as a child, and has since then combined a deep fear of cats with an
abiding conviction that he both exists and does not exist at the same
time. This existential doubt has led him
to grow up to be a writer while not actually being a writer.

He lives in Mumbai with his family, his book collection and a firm
conviction that modern civilization is in an interminable decline.